The Year of the French

by Thomas Flanagan

  It seems to me fitting that this most fateful conference took place in a darkness not moderated by so much as a single campfire. We had after all been moving in a kind of darkness of the spirit and the intelligence since crossing out of Sligo. Now, in the true darkness, our irresolutions and desperations seemed spread out around us, with Humbert’s will and determination ranged against them. We had placed ourselves under his command, and no choice was open to us save that of remaining there. He might, for all we knew, be mad, or obsessed, or drunk with vainglory, but that was of scant account. Now that I have time to reflect, and the best of reasons for doing so, I find that his nature remains hidden from me. At present, I am informed, he enjoys a most comfortable confinement in the Mail Coach Hotel in Dawson Street, as he awaits repatriation. British officers, visiting him there, have found a soft-spoken, rather coarse-mannered fellow, of most defective education, and inclined to barracks-room humour. He talks readily and willingly of the campaign, and is especially proud, first of the attack on Castlebar, and then of the forced march into Longford, threading his way between two armies. Those of us who followed his commands saw little of this easy affability. He was a naked will—fierce, cajoling, whatever served his purpose. I would never have made a general, and have no regrets upon that score.

  “Now then,” he said. “It remains only for the Irish officers to explain to their men that we are moving southwards, to join with our brave comrades, and to fight the last battles, as we have fought and won the earlier ones. But before we move out, we must implore our brave and good priest, who has shared our dangers, to again call upon God to bless our cause. For the men ranged against us are not only foreigners to this island, and its oppressors, they are heretics, whose eyes have not received the light of God as it shines through the powerful lamp of our sacred Church. The Church marches with us. God marches with us.”

  We were not to be spared even this. At the request of Humbert, to whom religion is of less account than it is to Tom Paine, the wretched Murphy delivered to us all one of those sectarian harangues which came to him so readily, setting upon us the blind seal of his bigotry. His voice, rasping and hoarse, was well suited to his discourse, and so too—though here I may display my own prejudices—was the language of its delivery, that Irish tongue which speaks to me of bogs and the rank life of the cabins. And yet it was not as a Protestant that I took the greatest offence. I had once seen in our conspiracy a union of hearts, pledged to sweep away forever the rancorous discord of creeds by which our land was disfigured. It had proved a vain hope, nursed in Dublin and Belfast by city-bred men, lawyers and merchants and physicians. Beneath the dark skies of Ireland, between bog and ocean, moorland and hill, it crumbled to dust.

  I could not make out all of his harangue, for he spoke too rapidly, the words tumbling out and falling upon each other, but I had no need. The air had grown chill, though it was windless, and his voice shattered the silence. I turned away before he had done, and shouldered my way to the edge of the crowd, where I found myself standing beside MacCarthy. He was leaning forward, his hands hugging his elbows.

  “An impassioned orator,” I said.

  MacCarthy cleared his throat and spat.

  “We have a long march before us, it would seem,” I said.

  “I made a longer one once,” he said. “All the way from Kerry. But mind you, I made it at my leisure. A night in this town, and six months in that. A more comfortable method entirely.”

  “The men are more ready than I had feared they would be,” I said.

  “What else can they do, the poor hoors? That fellow will buck them up,” he said, and his voice gestured contemptuously towards Murphy. “Those were the best times I ever had, those times when I was on the road. And I didn’t know it then. You never know.”

  “No,” I said. “You never know.”

  That was to be my last conversation with MacCarthy, save one. I walked away from him, and stood by myself, my back to a thorn tree. Murphy’s voice moved at last from scream to drone, and then fell into a silence. There was a stirring about me. We would rest here, until dawn, and men moved to the soft grass of pasturelands. I heard them talking, their voices woven together, Irish and French. I felt myself separated from all of them. There was a void at my centre, devoid of thought, into which memories drifted unbidden, pale and fragmentary.

  Collooney to Manor Hamilton, September 5–6

  From Collooney they had marched through the day from their victory into darkness. Quiet, frightened villages lay behind them, by river bend, by crossroads. Silent cabins watched them, their windows wary eyes, dark and blank, grimy, time-darkened thatch falling like hair over low brows. Cattle watched them from the fields, lifting heavy head from sour pastureland. French drummers beat the march for them, a hollow heartbeat, feet moved to its pulse. His throat was parched for whiskey, warm milk, well water.

  He remembered Teeling, a young prince of brightness, a poem fleshed and clothed, rider wedded to sunlight and horse, blue coat against rank hillside grass, his arm outstretched. Now, near the head of the column, Teeling walked the horse, the image divided now, powerful heavy-boned mare and beside her a tall, thin man with sloping shoulders. He walked with leaden balls of weariness shackling his ankles, tall farmer plodding by plough horse. But in that moment, clearing the wall, bay’s head pointed towards the Collooney cannon, he had been a figure of legend, chieftain or prince, as powerful as verse or violin. We followed after, caught in the snares of his courage. As children follow a father’s long stride, walking towards fair or wake-house.

  In the wake of that ride, a child writhed and screamed on the road as knife and saw cut through bone and flesh. A boy slipping over a wall in Tobercurry, his leg was payment made for Teeling’s bravery. Well did poets call death the merchant. For our small victory, we walked along a roadside of the dead and mangled. French merchant, white apron and rolled-back sleeves, blood smeared his forearms. Through shame, we kept our eyes upon the ground and yet we saw it all.

  Near him the boy’s brother walked, dazed and silent, tearstained face beneath mop of black hair. He shook off rough hands placed upon his arms, thin shoulders hunched to shelter his misery. Tramping with strangers beneath the flat afternoon sky. What brought them out, the two of them, clambering over the wall like boys set to raid an orchard? The excitement of armed men on the road, fifes, a flapping banner. A sin dark as Cain is on us, to have stolen children from familiar walls. Tomorrow’s fifes will call other children, spalpeens who see glory shining from pikes sloped upon weary shoulders, boys weary of coarse-voiced, bullying fathers, spades, scythes, lowing cattle, dunghills, smoke-reeking cabins, the drip of rain from sodden thatch. Perhaps a servant boy wearing slavery’s regalia, white stockings and buckled shoes. Standing behind high-backed chair, his master’s head half hidden by the polished wood, he hears a tumult in the road and gives the slip to silverware and toil.

  Sudden sunlight fell upon a patch of distant hill. Grass glistened. A bright, empty world stretched towards its horizons. Brightness pulled at him from hill and field. Far off, a mountain path ran, sketched by thin pencil, a delicate line of brown meandering through hillside pastures held in green haze. A silence wide as the skies. He was as voiceless as the scene before him, his thoughts as shapeless. Was he a whit more clever than ploughboy or servant, snared by the same bright lures? Far behind now, in Castlebar, MacKenna sat in the front room above the shop, his book resting between his propped elbows. Voices wreathed him: Brid, Timothy. And far beyond Castlebar, in Killala itself, his own manuscripts, sharp pens, clean white paper lay in their box in Judy Conlon’s cabin. Perhaps. Or perhaps the King’s soldiers had taken Killala, fired the cabins. Long strands of words, images like massy gold turned in seconds to black ash. He watched them burn. A different world.

  At late evening they halted in Dromahair, by the ruined castle, and he watched Humbert climb the low hill to survey the terrain, his two French officers beside him, and Bartholemew Teeling. Unknown castle, th
e whole countryside unknown, beyond them, beyond bright evening, darkness waited for them. He shivered. Humbert pointed, towards the west and then towards the south, his arm outstretched, a statue. Only Humbert, sly, heavy cat, was free. We follow. Where?

  “If we beat them all off the way we did those fellows back there, we will be safe in the hills in three days,” Michael Geraghty said to him.

  “We may,” MacCarthy said. “But the lads we left behind us in Collooney will not.”

  “Ach, we will,” Geraghty said. “That fellow has the lucky touch.”

  “I do not think he has,” MacCarthy said. “I think his luck will run out before long, and ours with it.”

  “Jesus Christ, Owen,” Geraghty said, shocked and frightened. He looked around him to see who might be listening. “That is a terrible thing to say. What makes you say such a thing?”

  He shook his head. “I cannot say. I was standing here, right where we are standing now, looking at them up there on the hill, without a thought in my mind. He held out his arm, to point to something or other, and I thought, Our luck will run out. It was our death that he was pointing to.”

  He saw a shiver run across Geraghty’s shoulders, like a hare through deep grass.

  “Sure what do we know of such things?” Geraghty said in a voice that begged for reassurance. “That fellow knows. Isn’t he a general from France?”

  “He is indeed. And he will go back to France and leave us where Jesus left the Jews.”

  “It must be wonderful,” Geraghty said sarcastically, “to be able to read the future from the way a man stretches out his arm.”

  MacCarthy grinned, and put his hand on Geraghty’s shoulder. “Wonderful indeed.”

  But for all that, it was wonderful. Something to trust without understanding, as images came for poetry. Reason was but a ploughboy doing sums on a slate, right sometimes and wrong others. Images carried their own truth, buried deep beneath appearances. An arm outstretched across an evening sky.

  It stayed with him after they had resumed the march, as the air thickened, as they walked into darkness. He turned once, and could see hill and castle behind him in the western sky, held in the last light, the castle black and ominous, mute, hulking beast shouldering the horizon. The images did not lie, but a man could fail to understand them. Set them down at night upon the page, shining in the power of their truth, and in the morning they would lie there lifeless, thin and bent out of shape. One thing was certain. They were not spun out from within. They came from elsewhere, a gift to poets.

  With darkness the chill came, presage of autumn. Nights now would begin to lengthen, coming earlier by a bit each day. By December, light would be bled from the air by four or five in the afternoon. A dark world. Safety in darkness. In cabins and taverns far to the south, safe beyond the Shannon, they would gather in winter’s night, hot whiskey on the table, music, the disputations of poets. His world. Stretching out beyond his memories to the ensuring past. Not this. Alien darkness of bewildered men, a roadside of the dying. Distant from him by the length of a world, the sheltering winter darkness of Munster.

  He loitered at the outskirt of the small semicircle gathered to hear Humbert and Teeling. Humbert’s voice a rumble, deep-bellied, and Teeling’s dry northern speech, harsh and unmelodious. He heard without surprise that they were moving south, towards the midlands. It gave meaning to the outstretched arm. They would blunder southwards to some Godforsaken bog, red turf an ooze beneath the feet, lost in midland waste, edged by villages with unfamiliar names. “The Church marches with us,” Teeling said, translating Humbert’s words; “God marches with us.” Centuries before, at Kinsale on the Cork coast, D’Aquila, Spanish commander, poignard beard, breastplate of burnished steel, Christ-inspired, hammer of heretics: “Christ never died for these people.” Neither did D’Aquila. After the surrender, honours of war for the Spaniards, soldiers of Christ, and a gift of fresh fruit from Mountjoy. Not for the Irish. Fleeing the English, O’Sullivan Beare had hacked his way across Munster and Connaught in dead winter, slaughtering his horses at Shannonside. “God marches with us.” Murphy seized upon the words, embroidered them. Christ’s deputy. In the darkness, MacCarthy saw him in imagination, short, bandy-legged, fringe of thick red hair around shining pate. Words tumbled from a mouth overcrowded with teeth.

  He felt them listening. Drunk upon words, boiling in the blood like whiskey or music. Hedge priest, the Church his passion, Christ’s wounds, he touched the springs of their passions with practised fingers. MacCarthy felt himself distant from the words he heard, from those who listened. Only his fear gave a form to the darkness. A bog lay before them, somewhere to the south. Humbert swung his arm round to point, the arm a curve and then held rigid. “There will be a great scattering,” Murphy shouted. “The soldiers in their bloody coats will fly before us. The army of the Gael has risen up. God has blessed our muskets, our pikes. In Castlebar they fled before us, and on the Sligo road.” Murphy could not see the bog.

  MacCarthy stepped back, away from the listening men. Malcolm Elliott joined him. “An impassioned orator,” Elliott said. MacCarthy cleared his throat and spat. Poor Elliott. Heretic and stranger, by Murphy’s exacting standard. Blood of the Cromwellians in his veins, his father a magistrate, boyhood Sundays spent in the family pew, long velvet cushion and massive gilt-edged Bible, riding to hounds on autumn mornings, jaunty fox hunter’s body, “View halloo” to the other squires. What brought him here amongst us? Pamphlets read in the long winter evenings, in his snug farmhouse of cut stone, windy declamations, the rights of man, Ireland’s right to sovereignty, the rights of Catholics, reform of Parliament. He knows now. Murphy and Humbert have explained matters. “The Church marches with us. God marches with us.” “We have a long march before us, it would seem,” Elliott said. “I made a longer one once,” MacCarthy said. “All the way from Kerry.”

  Not so long, perhaps, as Elliott’s journey from big house to rebel army, but long enough. From Kerry to Macroom and the wild hills of West Cork, northwards through Kanturk into Limerick, across Clare into Connaught, through Galway into Mayo. The march of an army was but a small thing measured against the driftings of his youth, the music of taverns, hawthorne in flower, bright leafy hedges, fairdays and pattern days. The thread of his youth had spun itself out upon roads twisting through valleys, over hills.

  He waited for an hour, stretched out upon long, chill grasses, head resting upon elbow, until the last voices had quieted. Then he made his way, across the edge of the pasture, to the woods beyond. O Christ, he prayed, for once let me not be clumsy and trip over one of their savage sergeants. Close to the trees, he heard footsteps, the French pickets. He fell to the ground, his foot skidding as he fell across a cowpath. The sound of his body’s thump upon the ground was as loud to him as roaring cannon. He lay there, lips pressed together, reciting verses, prayers, shielding his ears against the sound of footfall. Then he scrambled up and ran to the trees, expecting shouts, the crash of a musket. He did not stop then, but ran blundering on, crashing against trunks, against low branches which tore at his clothing. Beyond the woods lay another pasture, a stone fence, open fields. Free now of obstacles, he ran at full tilt, his heart pounding, his breath heavy and fast. A boy in Kerry, he had run like this, but his body was heavy now, an ungainly animal. In the distance, beyond the fields, lay a hill. He did not stop until he had reached it, clambered up its slope, and then lay flat upon the slope, head down. In the chill air he was sweating. He listened, but heard only the pounding of the blood in his ears. O Christ, he prayed, let them not know about me. O Christ, he prayed, let them not come after me. He said an Our Father and a Hail Mary, and made the sign of the cross. His face was slippery with sweat despite its stubble of beard.

  He lay there until his blood had quieted, his nerves had ceased to shake his legs and hands. Presently he became aware of the hillside, of the thick damp grass, of his own body pressed upon it, a quiet weight. He rolled over and lay on his back, staring up
without thought at the powdering of stars, the small, pale moon. After so long a time amongst a host of men, he felt silence as a presence upon the hill, a cool, noiseless voice, a cloak stronger than darkness. He moved his hand forward and back across the grass, then pulled up a tuft and held it, the roots wet and gritty with earth. Fear began to slacken its clawing hold upon his guts.

  At last, certain now that he had got away unobserved, he stood up, and walked down the far side. He filled his lungs with air, and then sighed. Far off, there would be other hills. His back to the army, he was facing south. He set off across country, not running now, but walking quickly. A quarter-hour later, he paused and turned around to look into the darkness he had left.

  In a few hours, the drummers would be setting the beat for them again. The army would march to the cross, and then turn, taking the Drumkeerin road to Lough Allen. By cowpath and loughside path, he would precede them. And at Drumshanbo, please God, he would cross the Shannon. Let them carry straight on, to the midlands and their red, unfamiliar bog. He would be on the other road, into sweet Roscommon, cross the Shannon again at Athlone, and then make straight down the length of Connaught and burrow himself as deep into his own Munster as he could get.

  Let them move away from him forever. Feet, hooves, drums, passing at last into silence. Away from them now, he remembered faces, voices. Long lines upon the narrow, curving roads, pike and musket cutting the horizons of dusty summer, the smell of musket fire and sweating horses. The days that he had been with them blurred together. Rains softened the dusty roads. Skies cleared, and purple hills lightened to blue. At night, owls stirred in distant woods; badgers, weasels, moved by ditches. Randall MacDonnell rode jauntily, his black plume bobbing. Geraghty and the Ballina men trudged along in a clump, held together by remembered years, by the shards of a pattern broken by cannon fire. Humbert stood upon his hill, wrapped in the arrogance of his mystery. Outside Castlebar, men slipped upon blood-greased grass. A red-haired man lay sprawled upon his gun. A sack of broken images, he took it with him as baggage.